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Against the commercialization of spelling
Dec. 7th, 2005 08:48 amI apologize for misspelling Adam Kotsko's name as "Kostko" a few weeks ago. I promise it was an accident and I am not receiving money under the table.
Dec. 7th, 2005
Another Mars pano
Dec. 7th, 2005 09:15 amVia Emily Lakdawalla: A QuickTime VR version (not full-screen, but fair-sized) of the biggest of the hilltop Mars rover panoramas. This one is complete enough that you can pan down and look at the rover's view of itself; the star-shaped hole in the picture is where the camera mast attaches.
Sam asked about the accuracy of the colors in these images, based on something Stephen Fry said on QI. I'll link to what I wrote before on this subject: Viking photos published in the 1970s were often unrealistically "redded up", more because the calibration was done by guessing than anything else, but pictures from Mars Pathfinder and later are typically pretty well-calibrated unless they are explicitly false-color images. Mars is red in more or less the same sense that Sedona, Arizona is red, and the sky is usually dusty tan. Statements to the contrary are fueled by a mixture of conspiracy theory and some outdated statements from Gilbert Levin.
I think this particular pano is a visible-light one and the color should be pretty accurate (though the sky is probably heavily fiddled with to remove visible seams where the individual shots join up). How you can tell: Look at the sundial calibration target, the thing on the rover deck that looks sort of like an old Atari joystick (making it a sundial was the suggestion of none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy). The paint chips on its corners are green, yellow, blue and red, though after a couple of years driving around on Mars they've gotten a little dusty. That looks right to me. They look different in the photos taken with an infrared channel, though JPL tries pretty hard to give those a quasi-realistic color balance as well by reference to the visible-light photos.
Sam asked about the accuracy of the colors in these images, based on something Stephen Fry said on QI. I'll link to what I wrote before on this subject: Viking photos published in the 1970s were often unrealistically "redded up", more because the calibration was done by guessing than anything else, but pictures from Mars Pathfinder and later are typically pretty well-calibrated unless they are explicitly false-color images. Mars is red in more or less the same sense that Sedona, Arizona is red, and the sky is usually dusty tan. Statements to the contrary are fueled by a mixture of conspiracy theory and some outdated statements from Gilbert Levin.
I think this particular pano is a visible-light one and the color should be pretty accurate (though the sky is probably heavily fiddled with to remove visible seams where the individual shots join up). How you can tell: Look at the sundial calibration target, the thing on the rover deck that looks sort of like an old Atari joystick (making it a sundial was the suggestion of none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy). The paint chips on its corners are green, yellow, blue and red, though after a couple of years driving around on Mars they've gotten a little dusty. That looks right to me. They look different in the photos taken with an infrared channel, though JPL tries pretty hard to give those a quasi-realistic color balance as well by reference to the visible-light photos.